➤ Fallout Shelter, the review of the PS4 version 🎮

We were born in the Vault, we will die in the Vault: that was the old motto of the Overseer of Vault 101, in Fallout 3, one of the historical chapters of the series. But we would add: if we really have to die in this Vault, at least let's make it work to the end, as far as possible. And it's also a bit of the philosophy behind Fallout Shelter, the small but full-bodied mobile management software Bethesda launched in the summer of 2015 on iOS and later android devices. Fallout Shelter in hindsight was the company's first attempt to carve out its own space also in the mobile sector, and naturally had the task of allowing you to pass the wait in view of the arrival of Fallout 4, the following autumn, when everyone would have placed the smartphone on the table and held the controller, ready to survive in the post-atomic world that we know well. Bethesda then a couple of days ago really surprised everyone by announcing the arrival of Fallout Shelter also on PlayStation 4 e Nintendo Switch: it is the right opportunity not only to rediscover a valid title, but also to analyze how it has aged, what it has changed in, and how it behaves away from the mobile sector.

The hard, tiring life of the superintendent

Just take orders: in Fallout Shelter we are the superintendent, dealing with the construction, design and then the careful management of our very personal Vault. We will start with just the gigantic front door available, but then we will have to think about how to arrange the various areas and rooms of the underground shelter. And there are really many buildings to be built, from the fundamental ones to respect the three basic parameters of the subsistence of the Vault population (water, food and electricity) to more optional possibilities but that never hurt, such as closets to deposit a increasing number of objects. Fallout Shelter is a management intelligent and studied with attention to the smallest details: the error in the management of a single resource, the neglect of a sick inhabitant or a fire that we have underestimated, the lack of sentinels at the main entrance, any neglect can turn out to be a fatal mistake for our survival, and for that of the poor wretches of whom we are the superintendent.

Fallout Shelter, the review of the PS4 version

In the first moments of the game Fallout Shelter it is quite indulgent: it explains how the various rooms are built and what their purpose is, the connection between energy, food and water and the need to keep all three balanced to encourage the happiness of the tenants of our shelter; the first few times we are in trouble, for example with one of the three parameters wrong because we made a mistake in touching something, the rewards of the first missions or other bonuses will take care of us to get us back on track. But after the first few hours of the game, it will be up to us to think about how the Vault works, and this time for real: no errors are allowed, unless you like to start all over again because all the inhabitants are dead or find yourself struggling with the reconstruction after a disastrous situation. Fallout Shelter lends itself to hit and run games of about ten minutes each, the time to collect the production of the various rooms, move and reassign the new inhabitants and evaluate the construction of new buildings. The dead times are marked with the exploration of the Contaminated Zone, where we can send some of our best inhabitants on a mission, after having duly equipped them with weapons and armor: the logic of real time applies, so if we send an inhabitant on a mission and stop playing for three hours he will still be there until we call him back to the Vault; a prolonged period outside can both lead to the discovery of many useful items and to the death of the character, if he is not ready for the challenges that await him.

Dwellers add to the Vault population in two ways: by internal reproduction or by coming from the outside. In the first case we will be able to influence ourselves, by encouraging our tenants to procreate in the most banal method possible, that is by assigning a boy and a girl to the dormitories; each inhabitant owns SPECIAL unique, which make it particularly suited to a certain task (for example the management of electricity) and less suitable for others (such as food production). Some villagers have very high characteristics or SPECIALs, usually they are the reward for the Vault lunch baskets (sort of premium chests), but the parameters can also be increased with specific structures to be built in the shelter.

PlayStation 4 Trophies

Fallout Shelter arrives on PlayStation 4 also bringing with it a shiny Platinum Trophy: obtaining it will require at least 40 hours of grinding, in which we will have to build, upgrade, send the inhabitants to explore, complete secondary missions, increase the population of our Vault , in short, everything that is the basis of normal administration by the Superintendent, and even more! Fortunately, no Trophy is missing.

A Vault in the living room

Fallout Shelter hasn't undergone major changes over the past three years, apart from some minimal balancing and the addition of some elements absent at launch: for example Mr. Handy who can collect all the Vault resources in a moment for us , as if starting the game and doing it manually were the biggest chore of this life, and pets, which grant additional bonuses to our underground shelter. There are two ways to get them, open your wallet and give in to microtransactions or more wisely decide to do without them or wait to be lucky enough to unlock someone along the way: there is no shortage of short and long-term missions that will reward us for our results. , perhaps asking us to carry out simple operations after all, such as obtaining a precise quantity of a certain resource, arming some inhabitants and sending them on exploration.

The real novelty of Fallout Shelter is therefore its simple arrival on the console, and the possibility of playing it "big" on the TV in the living room: on PlayStation 4 the management system of Bethesda it performs very well, has clean graphics and no slowdowns whatsoever, which was not even so obvious given that very often the mobile titles that land elsewhere are not adequately taken care of by the developers. Bethesda, however, cares about the Fallout franchise, and the treatment for Fallout Shelter is no exception: we have also tried to make the controls of the DualShock as comfortable as possible; the experience at the beginning is traumatic, because the touch screen was obviously more intuitive and immediate, but little by little you get used to it and the combination of keys to keep in mind to move between the various rooms, zoom or equipping villagers with weapons is nothing too complex. On Nintendo Switch, with the same performance in TV and tabletop mode, things are much better because the touch screen functionality of the title remains available, which also makes use of the HD Rumble within certain limits. The real problem of Fallout Shelter on console is the cumbersome access and management of dead times: for those who care about accessing their Vault things can't be as simple as on smartphones, because you can't take a console out of your pocket, remaining tied to the physical place where we placed it; this can become a problem especially if we have sent a villager on a mission and we remember it while we are away from home, risking him to die because we cannot physically start Fallout Shelter and tell him to go back to the Vault. In that case the only alternative will be to resurrect it using the security's currency.

Comment

Tested version PlayStation 4 Digital Delivery PlayStation Store, Xbox Store, Nintendo eShop Resources4Gaming.com

7.5

Readers (9)

7.2

Your vote

Fallout Shelter was and remains an excellent management system, able to give a lot of satisfactions. There are errors from which there is no turning back, and if we make a serious mistake too many times in a row we risk having to create a new Vault from scratch, but it is an experience that offers many ideas and possibilities, enriched by an artistic and sound fidelity complete to the Fallout universe; the microtransactions are there, but they are completely negligible and do not seriously preclude any feature of the production. It's free, so we recommend you try it out if you've never done it before, and also go back if your last game was two or three years ago. On PlayStation 4, some immediacy is lost due to the lack of touch screen controls, but apart from the insurmountable limitations of different support, Fallout Shelter remains Fallout Shelter.